In 1970, I moved to Stearns County with my wife and little boy to live in a rented farmhouse south of Freeport, an area of nose-to-the-grindstone German Catholics, so we could live cheaply—I was supporting us by writing fiction for The New Yorker—and we found a big brick house on the Hoppe farm in Oak township that rented for $80 a month. With the house came a half acre we could plant in vegetables. It was a fine snug house, four rooms down, four rooms up, a mansion by our standards. A room for Mary’s piano and a room for my Underwood typewriter and a small back room for the baby and two guest rooms for our writer friends from the city who liked to come and soak up the quiet and drink beer at night and lie on the lawn and look up at the stars. To the north of the house was a dense grove of spruce and oak where we got our firewood, and beyond this windbreak was a couple hundred acres of corn. Cows stood in a nearby meadow and studied us. The Sauk River was nearby, to canoe on, and Lake Watab to swim in. It was a land of well-tended hog and dairy farms on rolling land punctuated by tidy little towns, each one with a ballpark, two or three taverns, and an imposing Catholic church, and a cemetery behind it where people named Schrupps, Wendelschafer, Frauendienst, Schoppenhorst, and Stuedemann lay shoulder to shoulder. There were no Johnsons or Smiths to speak of.
For three years, I sat in my room and wrote short fiction and shipped it to New York. After a shipment, after a week or so, I’d watch for the mailman every day with more and more interest. He came around 1:30. I’d walk out the driveway to the mailbox and look for an envelope from The New Yorker—a large gray envelope meant rejection, a small creamy one meant acceptance. Acceptance meant another three months’ grace. Eventually I ran out of grace and we moved to the Cities and I went back to my radio job and a couple years later started A Prairie Home Companion and the Lake Wobegon saga. When I invented Lake Wobegon, I stuck it in central Minnesota for the simple reason that I knew a little bit about it and also because my public radio listeners tended to be genteel folk who knew the scenic parts of Minnesota—the North Shore, the Boundary Waters, the Mississippi Valley—and knew nothing at all about Stearns County. This gave me a free hand to make things up. I put Lake Wobegon (pop. 942) on the western shore of the lake, for the beautiful sunrises. I said it took its name from an Ojibway word that means “the place where we waited all day for you in the rain,” and its slogan was “Sumus quod sumus” (We are who we are), and to the German Catholics I added, for dramatic interest, an equal number of Norwegian Lutherans. These don’t exist in Stearns County but I bused them in. The Norwegians, ever status-conscious, vote Republican and the Germans vote Democratic to set themselves apart from the Norwegians. The Catholics worship at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the Lutherans at Lake Wobegon Lutheran church, home of the 1978 National Lutheran Ushering Champions, the Herdsmen. On Sunday morning, everyone is in church, contemplating their sinful unworthiness, the Catholics contemplating the unworthiness of the Lutherans, the Lutherans the unworthiness of the Catholics, and then everyone goes home to a heavy dinner.
If anyone asked why the town appeared on no maps, I explained that, when the state map was drawn after the Civil War, teams of surveyors worked their way in from the four outer corners and, arriving at the center, found they had surveyed more of Minnesota than there was room for between Wisconsin and the Dakotas, and so the corners had to be overlapped in the middle, and Lake Wobegon wound up on the bottom flap. (In fact, the geographic center of the state is north of there, in Crow Wing County, but never mind.)
Anyway, “Gateway to Central Minnesota” is the town slogan. And through the gateway over the years came a procession of characters. The three boys who drive to Iowa one February morning when they hear of Buddy Holly’s plane crash and their discovery of his blue guitar in the snowy field. The stolid Father Emil, who said, in regard to abortion, “If you didn’t want to go to Chicago, why did you get on the train?” and the town handyman Carl Krebsbach who repairs the repairs of the amateurs, and Bruno the fishing dog, and the irascible Art of Art’s Baits and Night O’Rest motel, its premises studded with warning signs (“Don’t clean fish here. Use your brains. This means you!!!”), and Dorothy of the Chatterbox Café and her softball-size caramel rolls (“Coffee 25¢, All Morning 85¢, All Day $1.25, Ask About Our Weekly Rates”), and Wally of the Sidetrack Tap, where old men sit and gradually come to love their fellow men by self-medication. It was Wally’s pontoon boat, the Agnes D, on which the twenty-two Lutheran pastors crowded for a twilight cruise and weenie roast. When the grill capsized and the Agnes D pitched to starboard, they were plunged into five feet of water and stood quietly, heads uplifted, and waited for help to arrive. It’s a town where the Lutherans all drive Fords bought from Clarence at Bunsen Motors and the Catholics all drive Chevys from Florian at Krebsbach Chevrolet. Florian is the guy who once forgot his wife at a truckstop. Her name is Myrtle.
The stories always start with the line “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” and then a glimpse of the weather. It’s a fall day, geese flying south across a high blue sky, the air sweet and smoky, the woods in gorgeous colors not seen in Crayola boxes, or it’s winter, snowflakes falling like little jewels from heaven, and you awake to a world of radiant grandeur, trees glittering, the beauty of grays, the bare limbs of trees penciled in against the sky, or it’s spring, the tomatoes are sprouting in little trays of dirt on the kitchen counter, the tulips and crocuses, the yellow goldfinches arriving from Mexico, or it’s summer, the gardens are booming along, the corn knee-high, and a mountain range of black thunderclouds is piling up in the western sky. And then you go on to talk about Norwegian bachelor farmers sitting on the bench in front of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery or the Chatterbox, where large phlegmatic people sit at the counter talking in their sing-song accent. So how you been then? Oh, you know, not so bad, how’s yourself, you keeping busy then? Oh yeah, no rest for the wicked. You been fishing at all? I was meaning to but I got too busy. How about yourself? Nope. The wife’s got me busy around the house, you know. Yeah, I know how that goes.—And so forth. And you slip into your story, and take it around the turns and bring it to a point of rest, and say, “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon,” and that’s all there is to it.